Tag Archives: Year In Review

A reflection on family, business, and travel. See also: 2015, 2014, 2013.

I definitely feel older this year. Not yet in the “my body is aging” sense, but in the “I am definitely not a kid anymore” sense. I am acutely aware of all the responsibilities I hold as a father and husband (and homeowner, for that matter). This post is a couple days late accordingly.

What a year. It’s hard to imagine life moving any faster — and then it does. Having a second kid is parenting squared.

Wait a sec… I haven’t blogged about my son yet. Hey, Charlie!

Charles Edward Bachhuber was born at home on December 16th, 2015 weighing 9 pounds 6 ounces. He’s a total bundle of joy. Leah, Ava, and I are proud to welcome him to the family, and can’t wait to share our world with him.

Here are some of the highlights of the year from Instagram:

Hiking to Silcox Hut on our first baby-free weekend (January)

Celebrating Ava’s first birthday in Amsterdam (March)

Spray Rodeo (May)

Our new house in Tualatin (June)

Filling in the koi pond (July, August, September)

Kid-free weekend getaway in NYC (July)

Shane and Angela’s wedding (August)

Family trip to Banff (August)

Halloween (October, duh)

Father-daughter trip to Seattle (November)

Leah graduated nursing school — and passed her boards two days later (December)

Post-holiday relaxing (December)

Professionally-speaking

There were two big points to my career this year: joining Fusion (May), and then leaving (November). Yeah yeah, thanks for the jokes about me holding down a full-time job.

I joined Fusion because I’ve always wanted to work for a news organization. It seemed like the prime opportunity to build a distributed technology team within a startup media company. But, as I discovered, sometimes things don’t work out the way you want them to.

Fusion was a great “Intro to Management” experience. In hindsight, I can safely say I had no idea what I was getting into. And now I know! But it took me a half year of experience in the role, and consuming dozens upon dozens of blog posts, podcasts, and books, to fully appreciate how a management role is different than what I’ve historically done.

The takeaway I can share in a sentence: distributed and co-located teams don’t mix. Companies with both a physical office and remote employees absolutely need to operate as though everyone is distributed. Without this commitment, many things break in many frustrating ways. And, learning to be a manager in this context is incredibly difficult.

Since November, I’ve been back in the saddle with Hand Built. Business is going well. Notably, I helped PBS Frontline launch their new website, and built a new blog for Pottery Barn. I also have a number of potential projects in the hopper for 2016.

What I’m most proud of professionally, though, is how much time I get to spend contributing to open source. In 2015, this turned out to be 12.26% of all tracked time (282 hours). On behalf of Hand Built, this was 128 hours towards WP-API, 60 hours towards WP-CLI, and 13 hours towards WordPress core.

Jet-setting

Travel slowed way down for me this year — and I didn’t make MVP Gold on Alaska. According to TripIt, here’s the tally for 2015 compared to 2014 and 2013:

It goes without saying: the biggest event in 2014 was the birth of our daughter, Ava Lucille. The past nine months have flown by; watching her experience the world brings new meaning to life. Furthermore, the home birth experience, which Leah wrote about, was amazing, empowering, and priceless for the both of us.

From Instagram, here are some of the highlights:

Day one

First time at Sushi Ichiban

At Mo’s, looking at where her parents were married 6 mos earlier

Baby foot

Milk drunk

Camping at Spray Rodeo

Our growing family

Start of the traveling career

Ava of the Blue Lagoon

Checking off the butt wipe bucket list

Awwww

Ava with Grandpa Ned

Beach babes

Professionally speaking

This year has been more, uh, turbulent than others in my career. I started 2014 as a Senior Engineer with Human Made, splitting my time between client services and product. In early February, I was fired. Don’t worry — we’re on good terms, and have since worked together on a couple of projects.

When you get fired and laid off within the span of a couple of months, working for yourself becomes incredibly appealing. I announced Hand Built, my WordPress consulting shop offering bespoke development, data migration, code review, and devop services. Since April, I’ve gotten to work with a variety of clients including:

Airbnb

Billy Penn

The Chicago Sun-Times

Easy Digital Downloads

Fusion

Investigative News Network

The New Republic

Pantheon

Solid list, huh?

Given my time with Human Made and WordPress.com VIP, I was fortunate to have a good sense of the consulting business. Still, solid advice always helps. Mike Bijon and Boone Gorges were nice enough to give me the rundown on how they operate their businesses (also worth mentioning: Modern Tribe’s freelancer guide). One of Mike’s invaluable tips: target 20 billable hours per week for 48 weeks out of the year, as you’ll likely spend 20 hours or more per week on non-billable admin, sales cycle, etc. In 960 working hours, I need to make all of the revenue I’d like to make in a year, also keeping in mind added costs of benefits and additional tax. This was a great framework for determining how I needed to sell my services.

A highly-relevant aside: I made an early decision to switch from Freshbooks to Harvest. Harvest is so much better than Freshbooks. One of Shane Pearlman’s, uh, pearls is to get religious about time-tracking. Before I started my business, I hated budgeting my time. Work estimates were the last thing I ever wanted to do. Once you get hooked though, you never go back — time-tracking is the only sane way to manage your most valuable resource. Harvest has really awesome Mac and iOS applications for logging hours against projects, and Freshbooks is basically a faff to work with.

Hand Built turned out to be viable. In 2014, I’ve gotten to:

Work with (mostly) great clients on (mostly) interesting projects.

Be pretty good about working sane hours and having a proper work/life balance.

Prove it’s financially viable to be an independent software developer.

Closing the year, I’m spending the majority of my time with Fusion as interim Director of Engineering. It’s a somewhat of an odd limbo state — Fusion can’t yet extend a full-time offer because they don’t have a business presence in Oregon. If / when they do, I’ll probably accept, as I really enjoy the team and what we’re working on. But the limbo state has its advantages too — I’m on the hook for a fixed number of hours each week, and get to have my side projects.

In 2015, I’d like to improve upon two areas: open source contributions, and my product offerings.

In starting Hand Built, my goal was to spend roughly 25% of my time on open source. Even though I’ve become the maintainer of WP-CLI and a co-leader of WP-API, I’ve a bit fallen short: 28.66 hours on WP-API, 116.17 hours on WP-CLI, and 56.95 hours on other projects including WordPress core. But, this does equal ~12% of my tracked time so I guess I’ve exceeded Matt’s 5% goal. Setting monthly time budgets, as with any client project, is likely the best way to meet the commitment.

When I chatted with Boone, he mentioned 75% of his business comes from recurring, on-going contracts, avoiding one-off pick-up projects. In his opinion, it’s the most viable way to be a solo web developer. My past eight months echo this — the majority of my billable hours are priced hourly and a part of a long-term contract. I’d like to do more code reviews and migrations though, so I need to invest time productizing these offerings, marketing, etc.

Jet-setting

Both Leah and I love to travel. In 2011 and 2012, I managed to hit ~130k miles flown each year. According to TripIt, here’s the tally for 2014 compared to 2013: